Software, weather, and politics, among other things.

Monthly Archives: December 2012

I share many of Anil Dash’s frustrations toward the current walled-garden social Web and how business deals, not open standards and protocols, drive content sharing.

Additional thought: Seeing so many companies tighten up their walls and restrictions over who can do what with what data sure makes me realize just how unique the WordPress ecosystem (and the Automattic business model) really is — it’s a profitable business based on principles of total data ownership and openness, rooted firmly in many of the old-school tenets Anil discusses in his blog post.

Pros: Turn by turn navigation (I’m shocked it’s built in, honestly), tremendously clean design, and it’s Google’s mapping data, not Apple’s (or TomTom’s). Cons: It’s not built into the phone, so we’re screwed as far as invoking it from Apple apps (though Google has a SDK so third-party developers can route around Apple Maps).

I suspect the call for Apple to allow third-party apps to provide certain services on the phone (mapping, Web browser, etc.) will only intensify now.

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There are two lessons from this exercise:

The Internet Archive is a largely unsung treasure.

If you aren’t cringing at your older work, you might not be growing in your skills and knowledge very much.

jaredwsmith.com is now running WordPress 3.5. Chief among the improvements: The new media manager. It fixes a ton of my gripes with previous versions. Twenty Twelve, the theme I’ve been running for a few months, is also the new default (with 20 days to spare!) and it still performs very well. Looking forward to doing more with it. I just installed the upgrade so I haven’t yet found any major pitfalls but it is always best to stay up-to-date with WordPress upgrades for security improvements (and just a progressively better experience across the board).

This video was shot Tuesday evening by Drew Cavanaugh in central Florida, where several tornado warnings were issued due to strong rotation on radar and reports of funnel clouds, including this video. Nothing like driving down the road to see a tornado kicking up ahead of you to perk you right up.